Disruption surrounds the marketplace. As companies face disruption in their industry, the race to stay ahead of or beat the competition is quickening. Software is one of the ways companies competitively automate, manage and analyze business processes, data and content and scale operations. And to successfully compete in this increasingly digital world, enterprises need to transform slow, error-prone operations from manual, analog processes to automated digital workflows and document generation.

However, as various departments in companies buy software applications, often the lines of business are choosing the best of breed solutions and platforms which don’t necessarily easily integrate with each other or the main IT systems. This results in companies having many separate software systems. With people distributed over large geographies, it can be difficult to coordinate work across the business and thus defend against competitors.

While obtaining the right software for each department and use case is important, this often leaves the organization without a way to easily connect the work flows across departments and lines of business to get the return on investment. What is the key to winning the digital transformation race? A digital business process flow platform.

Businesses that drive process efficiency and effectiveness across desperate software solutions and across every aspect of their business will be uniquely qualified to position themselves to exceed and excel. To do this, companies need a platform to digitally integrate, sync and create sophisticated business processes independent of the variety of different software solutions throughout the various departments in a company.

The issue is however, not just to connect SaaS applications, but to also provide process automation to make sure the processes from each of those applications work together well. Without a digital workflow and content automation (WCA) platform and corresponding analytics, it can be very difficult to make sure the investments the organization has made in separate software solutions are actually returning the investment. Nintex does just that.

Competitive Positioning

Nintex’s key differentiator is they offer a digital transformation platform comprised of Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex Hawkeye. The host of Nintex’s digital SaaS connectors allows clients to rapidly build and deploy a digital workflow and content automation (WCA) and cloud transformation platform without having to write code. The business result is the ability to acquire customers faster, increase the pace of innovation, as well as control and manage expenses. The platform allows organizations to automate their business processes quickly and easily. And the drag and drop interface encourages quicker adoption of the Nintex solution. Importantly, any workflow automated with Nintex Workflow can be deployed to native mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows) in a rapid and simple manner.

The Nintex platform automates processes on and between enterprise content management systems and collaboration platforms, connecting on-premises, cloud workflows and mobile users. Two hundred of the Fortune 500 companies use Nintex, including more than 7,000 public and private organizations in 90 countries, running millions of workflows daily.

For companies that are not ready to move everything to the cloud, Nintex also allows companies to create workflows that stretch across both cloud-based and on-premises systems and services, to distribute work to multiple sites for multiple purposes and move data and workflows to the cloud when they are ready.

Target markets include Communications and Media, Education, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Legal, Manufacturing, Professionals Services, Retail Services and Technology industries. Nintex solutions are designed for a range of lines of business within organizations, including Sales and Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, IT and Administration, Customer Service, Field Service and Safety.

High-payback document processes that are faster to implement with a system like Nintex include those in Table 1, customer-facing processes as well as back-office processes (see Table 2a and 2b.) What’s important to note is that the implementation timeframe and costs are fractions of a traditional enterprise-level IT system and instead of using a single, formal, top-down development effort, they are evolved with rapid iterations. This takes a page out of the lean-process, design-thinking community, where rapid iterations and pivoting is key to success and gives large organizations not used to the start-up mentality the edge to be more competitive, quicker.

Customer References

In speaking to Nintex customers our research found that many of the gains came from having an easy way to process and execute their digital transformations. This might include moving to the cloud, reducing the number and complexity of workflows like creating and approving a press release, signing and approving contracts, reducing resources and reassigning them to more important jobs as well as reducing the number of software applications used by the company.

The savings in time for enhanced workflows advanced the company’s position in the marketplace, allowed them to get to market faster and beat the competition. In addition, IT departments were able to be more focused on the needs of the business versus being taxed with the maintenance of many separate software applications. These typical IT responsibilities took IT’s time and focus away from the direct needs of the business. By implementing Nintex, the relationship between the lines of business and IT were greatly improved. With the ever changing dynamics in IT, the IT department needs to be highly agile and flexible in the solutions they provide for the business. Nintex provides IT with what they need to deliver to the business. This makes IT more relevant than ever, which is especially key when many lines of business are buying their own software. Now, more than ever, IT can play a key role in the success of the business.

Are you looking to digitally transform your business? Have you determined which processes are slowing the digital transformation of your business? And do you have a solution to take those manual, error-prone processes and digitally enable them? This report will help you in choosing a vendor that can help you with just that.

Having been a long-term customer experience advocate and studied the field, I as many others, have noticed that while companies are saying that customer experience is a key differentiator, that it’s at the top of their priority list of business initiatives, that they are spending more on it but when customers are asked, they don’t think it’s better. So how could that be?

I know many customer experience professionals who spend a lot of time mapping out their various customer journey’s for different personas or customer profiles, they have purchased and implemented some of the top omni-channel software, are conducting social media / digital media monitoring so they know what their customers are saying… So it’s not that customer experience professionals aren’t doing what they need to do. But if they are doing all that, why do customer still report, in large part, that their experience of most brands is not up to snuff?

What I discovered is that there are two groups of people that think about customer / digital experience, but in very different ways. One group of people tends to be the typical customer experience professional who has done all of the things I mentioned above and done them well. And then there’s another group of people, often in IT, that worry about digital performance management (DPM.) They look at the technology stack that is underneath the omni-channel customer experience technology and optimize it. They worry about things like page load speed, do shopping carts get hung up, etc…

And I found that often the two groups either don’t know they exist or they tend not to work together. And if that is so, the digital customer experience can suffer. Some brands have optimized both the customer experience, omni-channel technology as well as the technology stack underneath omni-channel technology. When that is done, the customer experience is truly optimized from both the DPM and DX perspective and the CX perspective.

If you’d like to learn more about this, please join me on Wednesday, Sept 28th at Sept 28, 2016 @ 10am PT/1pm ET for a Live Webinar and we will look at this topic in-depth! The topic? What the smartest brands know about CX and what they still may not be doing about it! And here’s a link to the research I just completed on https://www.constellationr.com/research/business-imperative-optimizing-digital-customer-experience. And here’s all the professionals who spend their days work making the customer experience the best it can be with customer experience professionals collaborating with IT professionals. If content is king, DPM is the ACE!

If you are wondering what I have been up to lately, I thought I would put all the research I have published into one place. Here’s a list of Dr. Natalie’s completed and published research and soon to be published content! It ranges from IOT, Analytics, Big Data, Customer Experience, Leadership, Organizational Change Management, Storytelling, Collaboration, Digital Transformation, Social Selling, Social Media, the Cloud, Marketing, Sales, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, AI, Machine Learning, Innovation, Social Networks, Social Media Monitoring, Mobile, Customer Service and Customer Success Management….and a few things in-between…

IOT (The Internet of Things), Innovation, AI, Machine Learning, Analytics and the Cloud

I’m judging the 2016 Constellation SuperNova Awards! Every year the Constellation SuperNova Awards recognize individuals for their leadership in digital business. Nominate yourself or someone you know before August 8, 2016.

The SuperNova Awards honor leaders that demonstrate excellence in the application and adoption of new and emerging technologies. In its sixth year, the Constellation SuperNova Awards will recognize individuals who demonstrate leadership in nine categories:

The SuperNova Awards are seeking leaders and teams who have innovatively applied disruptive technolgies to their business models as a means of adapting to the rapidly-changing digital business environment. If you have what it takes to compete in the SuperNova Awards submit your application today: https://www.constellationr.com/events/supernova/2016

If you are doing something really interesting, make sure to send in your case study! It’s your time to be recognized for your hard work!

What we saw at the conference was a full suite for customer experience. As point solutions turn to suites, Constellation Research predicts organizations that want to keep all the information about customers flowing in one place will most likely turn to platforms, suites and hubs for customer experience.

With suites there is the opportunity to know your customers better, via shared data, shared knowledge across lines of business for personalized and relevant offers, products and services. Instead of having silos trying to each engage with the customer, suites provide the opportunity for employees to collaborate when engaging with customers (especially when the organization change management issues are dealt with from a leadership point of view.) Suites also provide the opportunity to drive new workflows, products and services that meet customer needs better. If companies are able to take advantage of what suites offer, they can sell more, innovate faster and increase shareholder value.

As we listened to Mark V. Hurd’s (Co-CEO or Oracle) keynote, he talked about the issues in IT spending. He estimated, worldwide IT spending is down over the last five years and down 5.1% in 2015. He also talked about revenue growth being stalled because companies are focusing on cost cutting to make their numbers for Wall Street. However, the focus needs to be on choosing the right software to grow the company’s revenue. One of the big drivers for software is getting the customer experience right. With all other things being equal, Constellation Research believes customer experience is the number one differentiator.

Why? People expect that when they buy something, the experience will be at least positive if not really “wow” them. Otherwise, they will choose to go to a competitor. Mark spoke about the reality that most revenue growth will need to come from share shift as opposed to market growth. What this means for software companies is that they need to provide better software so that companies can provide better experiences so customer choose to move from their competitors to them. This also goes for software companies. The best way to grow revenue is to increase customer satisfaction. It’s interesting that this focus on customer experience seems to be the topic of the day. It’s something that I’ve been writing about for years. Customer Service and satisfaction perhaps has come into it’s own, finally.

Often times companies don’t realize they are taking themselves out of the running when a customer sees (in forums, ratings, review sites, social media…) that the company is not responding, doesn’t show it cares and isn’t there to work with the customer to make things right. In fact, 67% of a decision on what to buy in B2B sales is completed before the customer even talks to a sales person. The customer is getting what they need from reading what is in digital and social media. And that customer automatically looks whether the company is participating in digital and social media, and even though they may not be aware, the company who is not participating make take themselves out of the marketing funnel, because customers realize that if they bought from that company and had an issue, they too would fall into the “no customer service zone” and be stuck with an issue. Nobody wants that and customers, after years of pretty bad service in many industries, are choosing to leave companies they have tried to be loyal to, but just can’t be loyal to any more.

And smart data is a huge opportunity for companies. Why? When companies put their data in the cloud they are able to aggregate more data in a single location creating convenience for marketing, sales and customer service in a very data-driven world.

Mark spoke about his own frustration with the financial institution he banks with and their calls to him about his account. He explains every time they call him, in detail, what the issue is, yet the bank still calls him with the same question. It’s as though the bank is on autoplay. It’s important to know your customers, understand who they are and what they need to keep them loyal.

Troy Carter, from Atomic Factory, spoke about the importance of engaging fans and his traverse of the start-up world. His words were very inspiring and really emphasized the idea that companies need to think about their customers as fans. With that mentality, how they are served, could change quite a bit. It was great to see someone who has arrived at a lot of fame, remember his beginnings and be humble about his amazing accomplishments in innovating in the music industry.

The conference was also graced by a number of customers who are on the journey with Oracle to provide not only better UX for their employees to use the software but also to develop the best in class suites to better service their customers. Look forward to an up coming case study on a brand called Elaine Turner. And here’s a case study on how GM listens to their customers in digital and social media and drives better marketing, sales and service.

Why is this announcement so important? Verint® Systems Inc. announced substantial enhancements to its Verint Workforce Optimization™ software designed to help contact center, back-office and branch operations better manage the performance of employees and operations.Armed with a brand new user experience and analytics, this latest release includes innovations in performance management to help organizations gain even greater insight into how employees are performing, how well goals are being met and how to better engage and take action on these insights.

This technology release comes at a time when market adoption for performance management software is projected to rise, according to research conducted by Saddletree Research. In a recent survey 22 percent of respondents identified performance management as the “most likely” solutions to be replaced in 2016.

Why Is It Important to Balance Cost, Quality and Customer Service? Managing performance and productivity in a typical enterprise is no easy task, given disparate systems, complex processes and the differences in performance metrics between roles and functions. Performance management is a practice and culture that applies to individuals, teams and departments. It requires organizational buy-in, transparency, regular measurement and a focus on business-oriented goals. To help companies master these dynamics, Verint Performance Management™ features a unified set of dashboards, scorecards, coaching, e-learning and gamification capabilities that enable a closed-loop cycle and advanced approach to performance management.

What Does This Latest Release Feature? This latest release features a new state-of-the-art user interface that supports advanced visualization, data exploration, and analysis of employee and company-wide performance, providing critical executive insights that support time-sensitive decision making and actions. The enhancements also enable managers to work more effectively with the addition of new flexible scorecard widgets and dashboards. Likewise, employees benefit from a more intuitive performance scorecard and greater visibility into their individual metrics and achievement of goals.

What Does the Scorecard Include? The solution also features scorecard workspaces that offer performance summaries and overviews, heat mapping, performance comparisons and multiple views of key performance indicators (KPIs). Using these scorecard workspaces, users can visually and automatically identify answers to employee engagement questions, such as: Which employees are meeting and exceeding goals and which areas need improvement? Is the performance of employees consistent across time? Where is performance improving and declining? How do peer comparisons map and trend? And how does the performance of individual employees change over time?

How Can Companies Benefit from Advanced Analytics? In addition, a new improvement opportunities widget has been added to Verint Performance Management, enabling organizations to automatically surface KPIs that represent opportunity and improvement areas based on user-definable criteria and data analysis. With this capability, managers can quickly identify the employees and KPIs that need attention based on their scores or recent trends.

What Does Gamification Have To Do With Performance? Also embedded in this latest release is the ability to leverage Verint Gamification™, a solution that applies game mechanics and behavioral science “game thinking” in a business setting. Using gamification, organizations can engage employees, motivate them to improve skills and knowledge and solve problems, as well as enable them to take action and immediate control over their performance. The latest version of Verint Performance Management became generally available in November 2015.

For more information about Verint Workforce Optimization solutions, click here.

The SuperNova Awards honor leaders that demonstrate excellence in the application and adoption of new and emerging technologies. This is the sixth year of the ConstellationSuperNova Awards. Are you using IoT to create great, new customer experiences. Has the move to the cloud made your customer service more agile and the customer’s experience much better? If so, let us know. We want to hear your stories of using and developing:

IoT

IoT and creating awesome Customer Experiences

IoT and creating awesome Customer Service (Field Service)

IoT, the Customer Experience and its affects on Customer’s and Businesses Security/ Privacy

Using IoT to deliver smarter Marketing

Cloud

Using the Marketing Cloud to Increase Conversion, Targeting, Relevancy…

Using Customer Service Cloud to Service Customers Reactively, Proactively and Drive Marketing

Using the Customer Experience Cloud To Drive Awesome Customer Experiences

Using the Sales Cloud to Grow Win Ratios…

We will be recognizing nine individuals who demonstrate true leadership in digital business through their application of new and emerging technologies. We’re searching for leaders and teams who used disruptive technolgies to transform their organizations. Special recognition will be given to projects that seek to redefine how the enterprise uses technology on a large scale.

Are you really on the leading, bleeding edge? Then we are looking for you! If you are not on the edge, you are taking up too much room! We’re searching for the boldest, most transformative technology projects out there. If you or someone you know has what it takes to compete in the SuperNova Awards, fill out the applicationhere

What’s the Timeline look like? I kinda hate to publish this, because everyone looks at it and thinks- Oh August – I have plenty of time! Don’t kid yourself. It takes time to not only do a great project but also document it! So don’t wait to the last minute… If you are up to something special, start jotting down your project info so you won’t be late with application submission!!! And make sure you have data to show your results!

February 8, 2016 application process begins.

August 8, 2016 last day for submissions.

September 7, 2016 finalists announced and invited to Connected Enterprise.

Why bother? There’s lots of Rewards! Besides getting to hang out with me 🙂 and a ton of other really outstanding and amazing leaders, and get to hear what the top companies in the world are doing, you’ll also get…

The judges are technology thought leaders, analysts, and journalists selected for their futurist mindset and ability to separate substance from hype. The SuperNova Award Judges carefully evaluate each SuperNova Award application against a rigorous set of criteria. Judges will identify individuals who demonstrate true leadership in the application and adoption of new and emerging technologies. Want to catch a judge’s eye? Judges look for projects whose elements can be replicated in other enterprises. Want to know more about the awards and judges? You can learn more about the SuperNova Award Judges.

What Types of Projects or Inititatives Can Be Submitted? Here’s a list of the categories:

Who Won Last Year? I knew you would ask that, so here’s that info below. And they were all outstanding. Let’s see if you can beat what they did last year! We are really looking for the super stars. And you know who you are!

One way to enter the marketplace is to do all your development stealth-style and then announce to the world what you have created. And that, in fact is what RevJet, a tech start-up has done. Atter a year of confidential development, the marketing technology corporation revealed the first-of-its-kind Creative Side Platform (CSP), which extends it’s marketing technology to incorporate the ad creatives that undergird the world’s annual $500 billion media spend directly under the real-time control of marketing departments and their creative agencies.

So What Does This Mean to You? With the CSP, marketers and their creative agencies can now effortlessly construct, view, serve, measure, and automatically optimize all their ad creatives for all their media buys across all formats — including mobile, social, video and programmatic ad campaigns — all from a single platform.

“For years, I’ve preached to my team that we must always be experimenting with ad creatives, but we’ve never had anything like the RevJet CSP to make it happen,” said Grad Conn, CMO lead for Microsoft’s Centralized Marketing Organization. “Their CSP is the first truly comprehensive ad creative platform built to facilitate effortless creative experimentation at its very core. We’re quickly adapting to life on the CSP and are thrilled to onboard four of our creative agencies and two DSPs.”

What’s Different about RevJet? The RevJet CSP is the first and only comprehensive platform designed to enable continuous, automated, high-velocity ad creative experimentation and drive perpetual performance improvement for ad creatives of any format. The underlying CSP technology is already battle-tested in the marketplace, having propelled LifeStreet Media to a $100+ million exit and a market leadership position amongst Facebook app developers.

RevJet empowers marketers to automatically optimize the creative send to specific audiences in real time across channels and media. As ad tech and marketing tech converge, a platform like RevJet could be used with the whole content marketing process. For Marketers who choose this, it could give them differentiating capability compared to the competition. In addition, brands that building marketing cloud solutions should consider RevJet a potential differentiator.

Who is Backing RevJet? Nautic Partners, the Providence-based private equity firm, announced its $66 million LifeStreet investment in 2012, and in October 2014 announced a technology spinoff along with plans to launch RevJet as a standalone marketing technology startup. RevJet is backed by $2.5 billion private equity firm Nautic Partners.

And a Word From the Founder and CEO “Our CSP is purpose-built to extend marketing technology’s reach, finally unlocking the $500 billion dollars’ worth of pent-up value trapped within the world’s ad creatives,” said Mitchell Weisman, RevJet founder and CEO. “Tapping into this massive value is only possible by scalably increasing the performance of ad creatives across all devices and formats. Having already used the core CSP technology to build and sell a leading media company for over $100 million, we’re confident the CSP can drive the world’s media spend to go 2xto 3x further.”

Want to Learn More? RevJet CEO Mitchell Weisman and Microsoft’s Diana Choksey will be speaking about the future of creative and tech at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Austin this coming Tuesday, October 27th. Learn more here.

My POV: What’s really interesting is the convergence of technology, as well as silo functional departments in brands. Perhaps software will be the driving force to get departments that don’t always collaborate to do so. Another example of how corporate politics should be a white collar crime – i.e., not collaborating. But the digital disruption is driving more than changes to technology; it’s affecting people, process and technology.

Jive Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: JIVE), announced a new mobile application with the release of Jive Circle. Jive Circle is a secure app for employees to quickly search and discover other employees in their organization. Jive Circle seamlessly integrates with the Jive Chime real-time messaging app, which provides employees a fast way to connect with colleagues.

I generally don’t write about the future of work or employee-facing applications. However, I see the importance of them. Why are they so important? I cover the customer-facing applications. And how an employee treats a customer is directly related to how they feel about the company they work for, the tools they have to work with and how easy it is to get their work done. If the employee experience is bad, it’s difficult to expect the customer experience to be good.

With the world increasingly mobile and with workforces are more dispersed than ever, people are looking for new ways to instantly reach colleagues. Jive Circle, is driving innovation in the way employees connect. And when employees connect, customers get the help they need, and the customer experience is better. It’s really that simple.

What is Jive Circle? It’s a:

A dynamic employee directory for quick search, discovery and connection with teammates. Employees can quickly search a visual organization chart and identify subject matter experts across the organization. A simplified browse feature allows employees to easily filter and find information about their colleagues. Once a colleague is identified, a press and hold feature prompts connection icons for immediate contact via click-to-call, email or Jive Chime. Soon, Jive Circle will also feature a new calendar sync function that gives insight into who within the organization is joining meetings.

Enhanced security with the ability to add, edit and deactivate users. An ISO 27001 certified company with more than fourteen years of experience in the communications software space, Jive developed Circle with industry security best practices such as third-party testing and leverages the security of the Amazon Web Service environment. Additionally, IT administrators can easily import employee information to create accounts and build out their organization for the app, plus Jive Circle is built as SaaS, cloud-based software, which does not require any IT maintenance or installation.

If you are really curious, go see more at www.jivesoftware.com/circle. You can subscribe to updates regarding the Jive Circle early access program. It is available across iOS and Android devices.

How are your employees connecting to make better customer experiences?

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Dr. Natalie is a business strategist and a futurist. She has spent her careers looking about how businesses interact with their customers and their employees and she provides companies with the best way to create environments that foster loyatly, motivation and innovation.